Talk:Poseidon
Re: Inconsistencies Article, Poseidon may have survived by the "worship" he received from sailors crossing the equator (e.g. Carsten and co. forcing polliwogs to pay their respects). ;-) ML4E 22:50, February 24, 2012 (UTC) :I'm not certain but I do believe the Romans and Byzantines suppressed that tradition in the first few centuries of Christianity overtaking the worship of the Olympians, which was the time in which Thessalonica was set and also would have been the moment of maximum danger. Even if not, that's pretty thin gruel to sustain one of the most important deities in the pantheon; the theme of TCotTSD was mythological creatures in henotheistic "ecosystems," playing by rules very close to those that govern natural selection. When human activity damages an ecosystem as badly as the Christians had damaged the environment of the Greek myths, it's the apex predators who tend to feel the effect first, and if we stretch the analogy, Poseidon was an apex predator. :Of course, the whole thing's a little dodgy because there's nothing in the canon of either book which confirms that they're set in the same universe. All we have is a line on Silver's years-old website (which is HT's official website, so speculation there presumably carries a little more weight than it does here), and even that uses the noncommital phrase "appear to be." Turtle Fan 06:55, February 25, 2012 (UTC) ::Oh well, I offered that more as a joke than anything else. ML4E 18:40, February 25, 2012 (UTC) :::Oh, were you? Because that little tradition probably would sustain Poseidon some by HT's henotheistic (a word which I keep wanting to write as "hedonistic," by the way) universe. So it merited serious consideration. Damn the Internet for constantly forcing us to read meaning into words in isolation when those words were meant to be used in conjunction with nonverbal cues. Turtle Fan 07:47, February 26, 2012 (UTC) ::I did think it had some merit but it was mainly an idea that amused me. However, a more serious objection occurred to me. European sailors weren't routinely crossing the equator until the great age of exploration in the 15th and 16th century and thereafter and so the ceremony (or more accurately hazing) depicted in TL-191 would be a recent invention. This would leave a gap of some 1400 years for Poseidon to somehow hang on. ML4E 18:49, February 26, 2012 (UTC) :::Four years later. Eugene Public Library doesn't have Thessalonica - is it out of print? But I've read The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, and it's clear that Poseidon and Hermes are still in business. It's ambiguous what Zeus' status is; I think the only reference to him is during the climax, when Perkunas' power clobbers one of the bad things, and the Englishman says "By Jove!" and the narrator replies something like "Nope, wrong god." No word on whether he's still "alive" in the Spell Dump storyline. :::I think there are two options on how to handle the apparent inconsistency. One is to consider that Steven Silver was wrong when he stated that the two are set in the same universe, as he's made some unsupported claims before, like that Horatio Seymour was POTUS in Southern Victory. The other is to still assume that Spell Dump and Thess are set in the same universe, and to attribute the Greek gods "inconsistency" to some kind of butterfly effect of a fantasy timeline which we just don't know enough about.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 10:40, September 4, 2016 (UTC) Barony of Angels I'm not sure the link to Barony of Angels is necessary. The BoA is just LA County, calling a rabbit a smeerp, and not worth creating an article for this novel only.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 20:12, July 2, 2019 (UTC)